


Merry Little Christmas

by SegaBarrett



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Christmas, F/M, Family, Fluff, Kids, Mentions of Frederick's Injuries, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 15:04:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5502173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first family Christmas at the Freds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Merry Little Christmas

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Hannibal, and I make no money from this.

Frederick Chilton awoke, suddenly conscious of the fact that someone was shaking him awake. He had a moment of panic that he’d be waking up glued to the chair in the Dragon’s den, or in a prison cell, or strapped to Abel Gideon’s operating table.

A moment later, he stilled, as he gazed around and realized he was in his own room, laying in the waterbed that he shared with his wife, Freddie.

She was the one who had been shaking him, and was still doing so. He cocked an eyebrow at her, wondering what was going on.

“Frederick! You have to see! Come quick!”

“What?” Frederick mumbled, reaching up to brush the crust from his eyes.

“Come see.” She pulled his arm, then, smiling widely, and dragged him over to the window. She yanked the cord that brought up the shade, and suddenly Frederick was greeted by the sight of a snow-covered landscape; there were car-shaped mounds and tree-shaped structures, but everything was hidden beneath an unblemished coat of white.

“It’s beautiful,” he said softly. That wasn’t a word he would have used for very many things in his old life; maybe the first copy of his book would qualify, but not much else. Now, there were a lot of beautiful things in Chilton’s life, and they had only come about after he’d stopped being beautiful himself. It was strange how things turned out that way.

“Let’s go wake the girls. I’m surprised they aren’t up already, yelling about how it’s Christmas. That’s what I always used to do,” Freddie said with a chuckle. “I drove my father nuts. It’s a wonder he didn’t lock me in my room to get some peace and quiet. One time I broke into his room at four in the morning.”

Frederick chuckled. He didn’t offer a remembrance of his own childhood holidays, didn’t want to think on them after all, but they flooded into his mind regardless.

***

Frederick Chilton was five years old. He was sitting on the floor, legs crossed, staring up at the Christmas tree and waiting. He couldn’t start opening the presents until they had the video camera running, but his tiny fingers were twitching. He wanted to grab the present in front of him, to rip it apart, see what was inside, and then move to another. This was the one day this week that everyone in his house had somehow woken up in a good mood, and he didn’t want to waste it sitting still.

“Frederick, wait. Hold on,” his mother told him.

She was a pretty woman – tall, with long brown hair and big blue eyes. She was very quiet. 

His father was the one who did all of the talking. He was the one who was always telling Frederick, even when he was that young, about his “position” and how important it was. How he needed to make sure that he made something of himself, before it was too late.

Frederick didn’t understand. Why did it matter what other kids he played with, how his hair looked, how he wore his coat? But these things seemed to matter very much to his father.  
It also mattered that every present was in its place before they could start videotaping him opening the presents.

“Okay, Frederick,” his mother said at last; sometimes Frederick had the strange idea that she and his father were connected – they seemed to think the same thoughts, move the same way and it was as if they never, ever argued. “You can open your gifts now. Start with this one.”

He began to move through, tearing them up and holding up the gifts with glee.

One of them was a little stethoscope.

“That’s it!” his father declared with a huge grin. “You’ll be a doctor, son. I’ll be so proud of you.” He reached out and tapped Frederick’s shoulder, leaving the boy to have just a tiny shudder, and just a tiny glimpse of a thought – wasn’t he proud of him already?

***

“There’s so much to do. My father wants us to come visit. I tried to convince him that we couldn’t, but he’s gotten strangely family-oriented this year. I think it’s empty nest syndrome in the works.” Freddie let out a long sigh and looked down at her phone. “I think I’ve held him off to New Year’s Eve.”

Frederick laughed.

“My parents are tired of me. I don’t think they want me coming around, today or ever.”

“You’re going to have to get on that,” Freddie told him, “Because honestly, it’s downright depressing.” She snatched a present out of Laura’s hand and glared at her. “Give me a second, Laura! You guys need to wait like five seconds.”

“I’m going to get this video camera set up, I swear.”

“Well, you’d better hurry up. Trying to fend off these two is a losing battle.”

“I wanna see what we got from Santa!” Emily whined loudly.

“Well, hold on a second…”

Frederick’s hands shook slightly as he set up the camera. In his mind’s eye, he pictured tossing it to the ground and stomping on it, one of those fledgling desires to be nothing like his own parents.

That was too late, however, though his father’s pursuit of excellence had never led to him being glued to a chair or disemboweled. They had only led to further demands on Frederick.

He switched on the “record” button and managed a smile.

“Okay, feel free to get started,” he said, and closed his eyes for a moment. He would take deep breaths and he would make this work, just as he had every day since the dragon.

He had this down pat. He had to. He would accept nothing else.

***

Freddie Lounds kept playing with the button on her coat. It was probably about to fall off, but she couldn’t really stop herself. They were going to visit her grandparents, on her father’s side that was – her mother’s parents had died long before Freddie had been born.

She hated it, hated it, hated sitting still and smiling politely while her father talked with his parents about things she didn’t know anything about. She was nine and ready to explore; this was the worst possible way to spend Christmas Eve. Last year, her father had let her hang out over her babysitter’s house and make friends with the kids in their extended family – that had been fun. They’d climbed trees and she had typed up a little fake newspaper with stories about all of them, then handed them each a copy. The adults had all complimented her on how original it was, how Freddie was going to be “a real journalist someday”.

Here, she wasn’t a “real journalist”; here, she was expected to be seen and not heard. Why didn’t any other kids live near her grandparents? Had they run screaming into the night because they had found out just how boring all of this was? 

Freddie stuck her hand in her mouth and started to nibble on her nails. It was a bad habit, but she didn’t care. 

“Freddie, how are you doing in school?” her grandmother asked. She spit out a piece of a thumbnail.

“Okay, I guess.”

She went back to staring outside the window. Even the best journalist in the world couldn’t write an interesting story about this.

***

“Vroom! Vroom!” Laura drove her Tonka truck forward, knocking a few of Emily’s Barbies off kilter. Frederick watched this toy vehicular homicide with a wry smile – kids were so innocent. He hoped that the two of them always would be, that they would never run into anyone like Abel Gideon or Hannibal Lecter.

Had he been that innocent once? Had he ever been content to just run around in a fantasy world where he made all of the rules and could, in turn, break them if he felt like it?

When they had adopted the twins the year before, Frederick had been afraid of what reaction they might have – would they look at his face and think a monster had come to get them, to steal them out of their beds and take them to some horrible place? But they had been more concerned, fussing over him, talking about him having “boo-boos” and otherwise melting Frederick’s heart in a way he hadn’t thought possible. 

And now, here they were, having a normal Chilton-Lounds Christmas, whatever that meant exactly.

There hadn’t been news of Will Graham or Hannibal Lecter for years.

***

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Frederick. I’m ashamed to call you my son.”

Dr. Randolph Chilton was strutting back and forth waving a stack of papers in the air.

“Can we not do this right now, Father?” Frederick asked. “I mean, it’s Christmas. I just wanted to come home and spend time with Mom and… and with you.”

Randolph snorted and looked down at him.

“So that your mother can tell you it’s all right that your MCAT scores are a disgrace? That you’re still her son? She always was too soft on you, Frederick.” He spit the name.

“I just wanted to come home. It’s Christmas,” Frederick repeated.

“She’s sick, you know. She’s sick and she’s going to get worse because of you. Because you always let her down. All you had to do was study instead of wasting time on all of this other shit, and instead you couldn’t even do that – now you’re never going to get into medical school. What are you going to do, then? That education is wasted money, now.”

Frederick grit his teeth.

“I’m applying to graduate school for Psychology.”

“Oh! Wow! I’m excited. We got Sigmund Freud in the family – oh, no wait, Sigmund Freud had medical training! Not all this happy fluffy feelings shit!”

Frederick shook his head.

“It’s Christmas,” he repeated, feeling like he was talking to the air. “I just want…”

***

Frederick’s publisher called to let him and Freddie know that The Dragonslayer had debuted on the New York Times Bestseller List.

“Thought you’d like to know! Merry Christmas!”

The book had taken three years to write – one year to even feel up to remembering his encounter with the dragon, one year to write it all down, and the last year to find a publisher who wanted a book that was about Dolarhyde at all. 

“He’s old news,” most of them had told him, “It’s all about this cult guy these days. Have you seen him?”

A few had mentioned that the cult guy was “Actually pretty hot.”

Apparently Dolarhyde had not had the proper “hot” content to suit their needs.

“Ironic, considering he considered himself a Dragon,” Frederick had told one of them.

Finally, a tiny publishing house who hadn’t had much success with anything recently had taken a chance on it.

It had, apparently, paid off.

“We’re famous!” Freddie declared, wrapping her arms around Frederick.

He’d written the narrative; she had done fact-checking and interviews for background. 

The dust-jacket photo of Frederick was taken a year before his encounter with the dragon; Freddie’s had been taken upon publication. It listed them as a married couple living with their two daughters “in the Chicago area”. 

Frederick peeked out the window to see two outdoor cats scrapping. 

It was a beautiful day in Parkville, Maryland.

***

“How do you feel about the new uniform policy?” Freddie stuck her Talkgirl in one of her classmates’ faces.

“Uh, I think it’s fucking stupid!” the girl replied, giggling. “Also – Josh Gruber, you’re so cute! I wanna kiss you.”

Freddie rolled her eyes. She couldn’t really put that exactly quote in the school paper. Not like it was even getting off the ground, however – she had been insisting for the past three weeks that they needed a paper, and all she was getting was pats on the head and teachers talking about how “cute” her idea was.

She was not up for this uniform policy; it was a public school, after all. She figured that the best way to mount a defense would be to have an editorial published on it.

Getting a bunch of other eleven-year-olds to concur with the editorial, however, was easier said than done.

She sat at her desk and sighed as she tried to figure out what to do.

Handing out the papers to everyone had seemed like a good idea at the time – but maybe in retrospect she shouldn’t have made the headline ‘Uniforms are Fucking Stupid, say Students.’

But it wasn’t like she was going to get in trouble – after all, it was only two days before Christmas.

***

Frederick let out a yawn and leaned back into his pillow.

“I didn’t realize Christmas was so exhausting,” he mused. “I never felt this tired after a day at the hospital.”

“I don’t know how my father managed it,” Freddie chimed in. “At least we have each other. Otherwise you’d probably be seeing me at the hospital. I thought we’d never get them to go to bed – I’m pretty sure that Tonka truck is hidden behind their dresser, too.”

Frederick leaned in and let his hair brush through her locks of red hair.

“Merry Christmas, Freddie.” He gave her a kiss on the nose.

“Merry Christmas, Frederick.”


End file.
